My sources say no. And one of my sources is Radford’s classic article on the economic organization of a POW camp. Even if you’ve read it before, I encourage you to skim it again. His description of how cigarettes quickly became money in his camp fits exactly the standard Mengerian account.

Anyway here’s an excerpt from my article:

Last week the popular blog “naked capitalism” ran an interview with David Graeber, an “economic anthropologist” whose new book allegedly destroys the standard account of the origin of money. If correct, Graeber’s views would prove embarrassing to the Austrian School, because it was none other than Carl Menger who developed the first systematic explanation for how people went from barter to a full-blown monetary economy.

…

First of all, let’s be more specific about what Graeber thinks he would need to find. One of the standard disadvantages of barter is that it requires far more prices than a system using a single medium of exchange (i.e., a money). For example, if there are just 20 goods in the economy, then a board showing all the relevant price ratios in a system of direct exchange would need (20 x 19) / 2 = 190 unique prices. In contrast, if an economy with 20 goods were using money, then a board at the marketplace would only need to show 20 unique prices. So is Graeber really that surprised to not find evidence of traders dealing with 190 prices for a small economy, as opposed to discovering the advantages of money and then posting money prices?

This leads to a related point: Mises believed that economic calculation (for which money prices are necessary) was a pillar of economic rationality and civilization itself. So again, it’s not surprising that Graeber and his colleagues haven’t found evidence of civilizations with bustling markets and written records that were still relying on barter pricing.

Finally, we have actual case studies of communities developing money prices from scratch: namely, prisoners who end up using cigarettes as the common medium of exchange. The classic work here is Radford’s 1945 article, “The Economic Organization of a P.O.W. Camp.” There is nothing in Radford’s account that conflicts with the standard economists’ story about the origin of money. The prisoners certainly weren’t giving each other things from their Red Cross kits as gifts or as loans. No, they first were trading (in a state of direct exchange) and cigarettes quickly became the money in their community for all of the reasons that economists typically cite.

And to reinforce the point we made earlier, Radford explains that the prices (quoted in cigarettes) of various items were posted on a board. If Graeber and his colleagues stumbled upon the ruins of this P.O.W. camp, they would presumably conclude that there was never a preexisting state of barter, because they only found boards listing prices quoted in terms of cigarettes. There were no boards listing the thousands of pairwise permutations of direct-exchange ratios, and so clearly the Mengerian story must have been wrong — so would go the erroneous reasoning of Graeber.

To see the merits of the Mengerian account — and to understand just how fast economies can evolve from barter to the use of money — the reader should look at Jeff Tucker’s whimsical account of children exchanging Halloween candy in his dining room. (Hint: Neither Tucker nor his wife swooped in to provide a unit of account for the children.)

70 Responses to “Have Anthropologists Overturned Menger?”

“Yet this doesn’t follow at all. At least in the Misesian exposition, the original state of pure, direct exchange — where people just exchanged in order to obtain goods that they directly valued — would last very briefly. The advantages of indirect exchange, where people acquired some goods intending to trade them away again in the future, were so obvious and great that the practice would have begun almost immediately.”

Those examples are not unicorns. Both groups of people use(d) to live in a monetary economy, but found themselves in a situation where they needed to replicate with the means at their disposal of what they were already used to.

Gene, did you get my comment on your blog a few days ago, when I said, “I have no problem with gift economies preceding monetary economies. I have a problem with monetary economies preceding barter.” ? Apparently not.

It’s not hard to imagine how difficult it must have been to bring a large supply of agricultural goods (live sheep, ceramic urns full of grain, and so on) to market. This physical problem led to the creation of tiny clay tokens formed into shapes representing various commodities. These tokens were swapped at market to make exchanges that were later fulfilled with actual deliveries. This proto-money is the first recorded use of a material abstraction to represent a real object in communication

Pretty clear transition from pure barter onto a token-based equivalent to barter, and those intermediate tokens survive to this day. Not such a big step from that to commodity-backed money.

We only happen to have access to Sumerian relics because they used so much clay and some of the clay got fire baked (after which it lasts forever). There might quite possibly have been similar tokens before Sumer, made from wood, leather, or other perishables.

I appreciate the fact that you and I came to a similar conclusion immediately (interestingly, I had originally chosen ants but went with squirrels simply for its comedic cadence).

However, ants do exchange quite a bit. Their division of labor is quite impressive. In fact one of them barely moves for her entire entire existence. Tough to survive by sitting around all day squirting out larvae if those larvae aren’t valuable.

Oh, yeah, and what about the *thousands* of tribes anthropologists have encountered in the last century who had no money but also did not have barter economies?

Let me spell it out once again, Gene, since getting-inside-the-mind-of-my-opponent is not one of your strong points. I am not denying that there could be groups of people who don’t have private property. In that case, they wouldn’t engage in direct exchange as we understand it. So none of Menger’s reasoning could even kick in.

I am claiming that if we start with people who are using direct exchange, then they would almost immediately begin using indirect exchange. This happened within a day (I gather) in the POW camp, and within ten minutes or so in Jeff Tucker’s dining room.

So, when Graeber says that there is no evidence of communities relying on barter, he is subjecting Menger’s theory to a “test” that is wholly inapplicable. Menger never said there would be societies that lived for centuries or whatever using barter. (Or at least, his theory doesn’t require it. I haven’t read Menger in a while.)

Same goes for you pointing out to me that there are thousands of tribes that have neither money nor barter. That doesn’t pose a problem for me in the slightest. By the same token, the Swiss Family Robinson used neither barter nor money.

Now what would strike me as really freaking weird, is if you pointed out to me thousands of well-documented cases of tribes using money even though nobody ever exchanged goods directly against each other, nor had they ever done so in the past. That would strike me as amazing, and would make me willing to jettison Menger’s “fairy tale.”

(BTW, in my much-anticipated and long-overdue Bitcoin article, I am prepared to say it already renders strong interpretations of the regression theorem false. So I hope that bit of empirical evidence overturns your ideological view that “Bob is an ideologue.”)

<i.BTW, in my much-anticipated and long-overdue Bitcoin article, I am prepared to say it already renders strong interpretations of the regression theorem false. So I hope that bit of empirical evidence overturns your ideological view that “Bob is an ideologue.”)

Good God I hope you don’t say it renders the regression theorem false.

Bitcoins had to originally be bought with US dollars, which means Bitcoins have their roots in US dollars, and US dollars have their roots in gold ounces, and gold ounces have their roots in barter.

Once Bitcoins were bought with US dollars, then they could be exchanged for goods and services.

People didn’t just start trading Bitcoin money for goods and services. The VALUE of Bitcoins derived from the value of US dollars.

Once Bitcoins were bought with US dollars, then they could be exchanged for goods and services.

No, there was intermittent exchange of Bitcoins for non-money goods before people were buying them with dollars on exchanges.

My own opinion is that both gold and bitcoins served as a kind of “proof of work” that allows them to hold their value because they’re hard to “inflate” without performing significantly more work, ensuring enough scarcity to work as a store of value.

Gold gets harder and harder to mine, and so do bitcoins. They’re also both hard to counterfeit.

No, the work is not pointless. The work devotion of work to solving the hash inversion problems in bitcoin is necessary to ensure that a given block chain has the most computational effort invested in it, and thus that common knowledge of any coins ownership is established across all users. See my latest article on Bitcoin, which discusses this issue.

Likewise, the fact that gold requires (likewise) increasing effort to exctract provides assurance that others will agree that it is scarce and judge it appropriately.

Sorry, I was totally not clear in that last post, and it makes no sense now that I look at it from a disinterested perspective.

No, Bitcoins had to be originally obtrained by solving a computationally-hard hash inversion problem.

Using a computer and network connection that had to be bought in US dollars. In order to buy bitcoins, you have to buy a computer and a network in dollars. That’s what I tried to say before but failed. I don’t consider bitcoins as anything other than computer and network components.

I can’t have bitcoins (computer and network parts) unless I buy them with US dollars.

I’m trying to think of an analogy that works here….

No, there was intermittent exchange of Bitcoins for non-money goods before people were buying them with dollars on exchanges.

I consider that trading computer parts for things other than computer parts.

@Major_Freedom: Your position seems to be really stretching what is meant by “backed by”. If it’s enough that you had to buy *some* thing with fiat currency in order to use currency B, in order to make B “backed by” the fiat currency, then you can call any token, or any good whatsoever “backed by” fiat currency.

But clearly that’s not what the term means.

What’s more, I don’t even think you always had to use fiat currency to get bitcoins. Again, you just need the ability to communicate with a network, store your private/public keypairs, and be able to perform the SHA-256 hashing protocol and 160-bit elliptic curve signatures.

So, then, what if I traded someone my cleaning services in exchange for use of his computer, solved the hash problem for a bitcoin block, and thus earned bitcoins that way. (All physically possible, by the way.) Would you still say it’s backed by fiat currency?

Also, Major_Freedom and MamMoTh: bitcoins aren’t inherently “IOU-capable” or “not-IOU-capable”. Like physical cash, you can arrange for loans, escrow, and all kinds of credit transactions with them involving whatever enforcement agencies you like.

People still seem to confuse the Bitcoin protocol itself with potential protocols you could layer on top of it.

I don’t get it. You’re not refuting Graeber as much as you are restating Menger’s argument. My priors favored the Menger story, but the money-as-IOUs story dovetails very well with the rest of the anthropology literature I’m familiar with. The modern stuff is very consistent with the idea that private property is the direct result of human nature, but that’s in connection with reciprocal altruism. To make reciprocal altruism workable within a group, it was essential for you to keep track of who owed you what so that no one in a group could take advantage of you. To say that money is an outgrowth of whom to share with, exchange ratios be damned, is much more consistent with early human history than anything else I’ve heard.

Also, there is no need for there to be “the” cause of money. It is possible for it to appear as a result of barter elsewhere. But this still refutes that we know a priori that it *must* come from barter, which is the Misesian position, isn’t it?

As your computation theory advisor, my only complaint is that you didn’t express the advantage of money in big-O terms, i.e. that you didn’t say that barter price tables scale as O(n^2) while money price tables scale as O(n). It has the added advantage that you would have been able to sidestep the debate about 20*20 vs. 20*19, on the grounds that “A +/-1 in the calculation doesn’t affect the asymptotic behavior, simpletons!”

I see – Mr. Murphy, too chicken to even defend his attack on me in the place it was originally posted, hides on his own blog, where he can count on an audience unable to even comprehend my response, or do anything beyond throw personal insults in my direction. Well done!

Hardly surprising – the piece itself basically consisted of the argument “Menger must be right because Menger must be right” – it was a classic hit and run, not even an attempt to seriously take on my arguments (or even find out what they were) but just respond to what he thought I might be saying based on a few paragraphs in an interview _about_ the book so as to be able to say that he refuted the argument, which he knew would be faithfully parroted by sympathetic libertarian or conservative web sites who also had no interest in even ascertaining what my argument actually was or whether this really was a response to them.

You can choose to believe this or not, but I asked one of the Mises computer guys to consolidate all of your comments (left at their blog) and make it a stand-alone blog post. You had put so much effort into it that I didn’t want to just argue with you on the 2nd and 3rd page of the comments of a post on my article.

Once they had posted your response as a stand-alone blog, I was then going to spend at least an hour writing my own response.

I’m pretty busy today, getting ready for this, and believe it or not I’m no longer in academia and actually have a job. (I insist on being paid in money though. None of this, “You like my writing? Take it!”)

For someone who studies a lot of humans, you seem to have ironically completely misdiagnosed me. Can’t you see that I am extremely cocky and think I can handle your rebuttal? If I am so immune to evidence and arguments as you think, why would I have been persuaded by your latest remarks? Why would I feel the need to run?

So anyway, stay tuned and I promise I’ll address your lengthy responses next week (assuming I don’t get hit by a bus or something).

I see – Mr. Murphy, too chicken to even defend his attack on me in the place it was originally posted, hides on his own blog, where he can count on an audience unable to even comprehend my response, or do anything beyond throw personal insults in my direction. Well done!

Mr. Greaber, Murphy posted his article at the Mises.org blog AND THEN you responded with the 6 post comment. He isn’t “hiding” on his own blog. How can you say that? He just posted at Mises.org! My comment was directed at him responding to your 6 post response, which I guessed he’ll be able to easily handle, considering how utterly confused you are when it comes the nature of barter and money.

Hardly surprising – the piece itself basically consisted of the argument “Menger must be right because Menger must be right” – it was a classic hit and run, not even an attempt to seriously take on my arguments (or even find out what they were) but just respond to what he thought I might be saying based on a few paragraphs in an interview _about_ the book so as to be able to say that he refuted the argument, which he knew would be faithfully parroted by sympathetic libertarian or conservative web sites who also had no interest in even ascertaining what my argument actually was or whether this really was a response to them.

This is all just straw man nonsense that you wished were true so that you don’t have to respond to the actual criticisms.

You’re clearly more concerned with attacking conservatives and libertarians and re-interpreting history to promote some partisan agenda, and then you hide behind an allegedly empirically sound veil. You’re obviously a left wing radical who wants to reinterpret history so as to make a case that money is a centrally planned, “artificial” construct, so that you can pretend that left wing anarcho-communism will be naturally moneyless. So you hope that isolated backwater tribes and societies that didn’t use money, is possible to be universalized. It’s so obvious.

You clearly did not understand Murphy’s criticisms, and yet you claim that he didn’t understand your arguments.

Most importantly, your 6 post response in the comments were full of erroneous assumptions and assertions.

Contrary to your claims, barter does not imply spot transactions. It only implies that when trades are eventually settled, they are settled in non-monetary commodities, meaning they are settled with commodities that are not universally accepted.

No commodity can become universally accepted unless it began only minimally accepted. Cigarettes in a POW camp? Cigarettes were not universally accepted at first in the world. Cigarettes were produced and sold at first in only small portions of land and traded amongst small numbers of people at first. Alongside these trades, all manner of other commodities were trades. No money in the history of mankind was established by fiat that was not first rooted in some smaller trading sphere such that barter existed vis a vis that money.

You even made the case that money arises from barter when you said that irregular, occasional exchanges cannot manifest a money, and that only regular exchanges can manifest a money. Well, the first trades that took place were indeed irregular and occasional, and not regular. So those irregular exchanges, since they preceded regular exchanges, which preceded money, means that barter preceded money in your own argument.

Then, you fallaciously claimed that “units of account” had to have been created to “avoid market mechanisms.” This is inconceivable. Units of account are the foundation of market exchanges. They are used to facilitate market exchanges. How can they be an “avoidance” of exchanges? Exchanges do not have to be localized and hand to hand. I am sure you will appreciate that buying stocks and bond today does not necessitate you to actually touch a physical stock certificate or bond.

Then, to top it all off, you committed the common Aristotelean fallacy that exchanges imply equal value. Exchanges do not imply equal valuation. They imply opposite and mutually offsetting exchange values. You trade your cow for a sheep because you value the sheep more than the cow, and the other guy gives you his sheep for your cow because he values the cow more than the sheep. If this confusion had no implications to your theory then I would have let it slide as just another crank who doesn’t understand exchange, but because it does, it has to be mentioned.

Thus, for exchanges on credit, a giver of a cow gives his cow to someone because he values what he will get as more highly valuable. Now before you misunderstand yet another concept, I should say that this does not require that the other person give something tangible right there and then. The person who gave the cow, if there is no sheep going the other way, values what he gets in return, which is a psychic profit. It could be anything from feeling good about giving someone else something of value, or it could be the utility gained from the expectation that he will get something tangible in return at some point in the future. And guess what? it is silly and absurd to suggest that people who gave away their wealth in this way NEVER received anything tangible back, until the onset of money when the monetary commodity was universally accepted by everyone.

No, such exchanges on credit that were settled, were settled with other commodities that have not yet been universally accepted. That means barter. This is the case even if the exchange was not “spot”. As noted, as long as any exchange was settled in a non-monetary commodity, then it was barter.

In order for your theory to work, some incredibly absurd assumptions must be made.

One, it is necessary that no trades at all for anything ever took place anywhere, until some point in time, trading did start to take place, and all trades that began were for a necessarily previously non-accepted commodity, that instantly began to function as a medium of exchange that is universally accepted by everyone.

Two, it is also necessary that everyone acquired possession of this monetary, universally accepted commodity, so that they used them in there first exchanges. That means that if lapus lazuli were money, or if silver were money, that every individual would have to have a lapus lazuli mine, or a silver mine. In other words, not a chance. The only way that everyone could come into ownership of a monetary commodity is by that commodity beginning as a tradeable commodity in some locations, with some people who did own lapus lazuli mines and silver mines. No human could have foreseen silver becoming money, and the first people to trade silver were certainly not the first people to trade anything whatever. It would have been necessary that others traded commodities first, and then started to trade with the silver miners for what the silver miners wanted. A silver miner would not have wanted everything everyone produced and offered for sale. No, he would have wanted only so many cows and chickens, but more of what he doesn’t have, say sheep, which means cow and chicken farmers had to have traded their cows and chickens for sheep first, then trade the sheep with the silver miner.

Your theory is nonsense.

And for you to be so belligerent, and accuse Murphy’s blog visitors as being mindless parrots, is unwarranted partisan nonsense, and smacks of Marxian-style party insults masquerading as sound analysis.

Someone pointed out Dr. Graeber’s error and he corrected himself to Ludvig Von Mises. I was writing another correction pointing out that it’s Ludvig von Mises and was looking up Wikipedia article for “von”.

Under the section “Germany and Austria” it says among other things the following:

“In Germany, this meant that in principle von simply became an ordinary part of the names of the people who used it. There were no longer any legal privileges or constraints associated with this naming convention, although in practice, many people with von in their names are still listed in telephone books and other files under the rest of their name. (e.g. Ludwig von Mises would be under M in the phone book rather than V).”

So the article is citing LvM’s name as an example and links to his article too.

Ok. So let me see if I have this straight. The tentpole of Graeber’s argument is that “the flaw in the barter theory of the origin of money is that barter presumes SPOT TRANSACTIONS” (taken from his explanatory comment on mises.org). These supposedly are not supported by the evidence – Instead, we supposedly see societies where the valuation apparently does not have to be equal for the actors to be completely satisfied, using money only as markers for a vaguely valuable debt. I guess nobody ever told Graeber that Menger also had something that explains this supposed disparity perfectly (AKA the subjective theory of value)?

Is it not a spot trade when I ‘give’ a good/service in exchange for a debt, regardless of whether I receive some marker to represent my claim or even value it up front? Essentially, I’ve just bartered my current good/service for an unspecified mix of goods/labor/time from another in the future from whomever has this debt. I may or may not even care that the debt be paid and this is still true – obviously I must either trust/respect/love/fear this person to such an extent that the utility gained by the ‘warm fuzzies’/goodwill from the person who you’ve allowed to not even bother paying with goods/services/time is a satisfactory enough way for that debt to be satisfied.

Basically, all Graeber is proving with this evidence is that debt was (and perhaps always is?) the first ‘money’ created by societies, not that the debt wasn’t the product of a ‘spot transaction’ and thus somehow has magical MMT-like properties. Those who claim to already understand Austrian Econ should already know this (unless I’m seriously ‘off the reservation’ without knowing it). Economically, ALL actions where one human interacts with another are spot transactions – most of them trading time/services for time/services.

No, that’s not it at all. First of all I wasn’t writing a critique of Menger, but of Smith, and the fact that all economists start from Smith’s premises even though those premises have been empirically falsified. (Smith argued all moneyless societies must have operated by direct spot-transaction barter between neighbors when in fact none do.)

What I love is the insistence on endless generation of “well it must have been like that” fantasies which never even vaguely correspond to the reality of what can actually be observed on the ground – since, you know, actual moneyless transactions can be observed in a thousand different places and they never look anything even vaguely like what economists predict they should. (Ie, no, it’s not warm fuzzy love versus exact return. Real life and motivations are a thousand times more complicated.) You’d think if you have a model of human behavior that continually generates false predictions, people would eventually alter them in some way. The fact that economists never do tells you something about what we are really dealing with here.

Ah. That makes much more sense then. Looks like your conclusion fits pretty well within what the Austrian theory of Subjective Value along with their works on Economic Calculation would suggest to me (again, subject to my own, perhaps mistaken understanding). Smith certainly was no Praxeologist, and held over quite a few shibboleths from classical economics that tend to oversimplify things. Menger himself may have not grasped all the implications of his other discoveries either; evaluating whether or not Smith’s story of how social exchanges occur (whether it be money/debt/barter/whatever) looks like it could be. I don’t think this necessarily invalidates any of his framework (or those who came after and refined it), but it may require going down a few more logical paths/explanatory routes to properly account for how this fits in with the Austrians’ framework for interpreting economic reality.

Also, no argument on my side on the point that economists likely are inconsistent with regard to at least some of their conclusions, even on the Austrian side. This appears to be true in any discipline. I personally wouldn’t think that’s a very useful rhetorical tool as such (newsflash – we’re all hypocrites), but wholeheartedly agree regarding its entertainment value. Certainly seeing humans persistently clinging to false conclusions (even when they understand the correct logic and evidence of the matter) shouldn’t be a surprise to an Anthropologist. It should suggest that there’s little point in getting too worked up about people acting in that way though.

So far it appears your book is at least going to be an entertaining read. Thanks for the reply.

So I was looking for a good explanation of the regression theorem, and stumbled upon this article by Bob on the origin of money, which includes the following:

One possible explanation [for the origin of money] is that a powerful ruler realized, either on his own or through wise counselors, that instituting money would benefit his people. So he then ordered everyone to accept some particular thing as money.

There are several problems with this theory. First, as Menger pointed out, we have no historical record of such an important event, even though money was used in all ancient civilizations.

What’s your point Blackadder? Graeber didn’t offer such an account, if that’s what you’re implying. He hasn’t pointed to Eddie Money, ruler of the Phoenicians from 3230 – 3190 BC, and inventor of money.

Have you read Graeber’s long comments on my Mises article? The more he talks, the closer the story comes to Menger’s explanation. The big monkey-wrench he throws into the mix is spot transactions versus credit ones, I’ll grant him that. But as far as people just sitting around and then dreaming up money, without first having a bunch of barter exchanges to guide them? Nope, I don’t think so.

Have you guys seen what this much ballyhooed “abstract unit of account” was at the temple? (Hint: they could use it to kill werewolves.)

And just to show everyone that I’m equally smug for all posters: MF, in my understanding of the regression theorem, it’s not enough that some people at one point voluntarily exchanged things. That’s not a “link.” When Mises says that modern fiat currencies can be “traced” back to ancient commodities, he means there was a point at which the paper was legally redeemable for gold or silver. He doesn’t mean there was a point at which you could buy gold or silver with paper.

I mean using your approach, we’d say the dollar is still “linked” to gold.

The fact that you can’t even make an argument that isn’t based on straw men shows how completely bankrupt your position is. Nowhere do I say someone just dreamed up money of account and even from the extremely limited samplings of my writing you have deigned to consult, you must now realize that. I argue that in fact the emergence of systems capable of comparing proportional values arose from pragmatic needs of various sorts – for example, the need to pay legal settlements, or make redistributive allocations in Sumerian temples, etc – but that the classic barter scenario is for logical and empirical reasons almost certainly not one of them.

But your essay has nothing to do with scholarship. You just wanted to be able to *say* you’d refuted my argument, without actually having to even find out what it was. Then you could take your claim to a dutiful echo-chamber of ideologically committed supporters who would, similarly, play along without bothering to ascertain what I’d argued or whether any argument you’d made had actually refuted any of it. From an intellectual perspective, it’s complete failure, but it doesn’t matter, because with the audience you’ve chosen, the quality or relevance of your argument makes no difference at all.

Have you seen my explanation above? I’m going to write a careful response to you next week.

Also, I don’t mind if you call me a scoundrel, anti-scholar, ideologue, etc. etc., but please lay off of the commenters here. A bunch of them are actually on your side, right? So it makes no sense for you to keep claiming that I’m running here and hiding. (As opposed to the merciless critics over at Mises.org?!)

Dare I say it? It seems you have walked into this episode with a preconceived view–“those darned economists are ideologues who won’t take me seriously!”–and no matter what evidence you see to the contrary, you won’t drop that view.

Really man, look at how you are flinging insults and accusations, compared to my tone. Let’s calm down please.

Something seemed familiar about the name, and it clicked this morning. I remember David Graeber from usenet in the 1990s. I don’t know if he’s mellowed since (it seems not), but he was certainly a nasty piece of work back then. He seemed somewhat obsessed with libertarians and spent a good deal of his time spewing pages of vitriol from his Yale email address.

In the United States, for example, the Republican Party is dominated by two ideological wings: the libertarians and the “Christian right.” At one extreme, Republicans are free-market fundamentalists and advocates of individual liberties (even if they see those liberties largely as a matter of consumer choice); on the other, they are fundamentalists of a more literal variety, suspicious of most individual liberties but enthusiastic about biblical injunctions, “family values,” and charitable good works. At first glance it might seem remarkable that such an alliance manages to hold together at all (and certainly they have ongoing tensions, most famously over abortion). But, in fact, right-wing coalitions almost always take some variation of this form. One might say that the right’s approach is to release the dogs of the market, throwing all traditional verities into disarray; and then, in this tumult of insecurity, offer themselves tip as the last bastion of order and hierarchy, the stalwart defenders of the authority of churches and fathers against the barbarians they have themselves unleashed. A scam it may be, but it is a remarkably effective one; and one result is that the right ends up seeming to have a monopoly on value. It manages, we might say, to occupy both positions, on either side of the divide: extreme egoism and extreme altruism.

Consider, for a moment, the word “value.” When economists talk about value they are really talking about money–or, more precisely, about whatever it is that money is measuring; also, whatever it is that economic actors are assumed to be pursuing. When we are working for a living, or buying and selling things, we are rewarded with money. But whenever we are not working or buying or selling, when we are motivated by pretty much anything other than the desire to get money, we suddenly find ourselves in the domain of “values.” The most commonly invoked of these are, of course, “family values” (which is unsurprising, since by far the most common form of unpaid labor in most industrial societies is child-rearing and housework), but we also talk about religious values, political values, the values that attach themselves to art or patriotism–one could even, perhaps, count loyalty to one’s favorite basketball team. All are seen as commitments that are, or ought to be, uncorrupted by the market. At the same time, they are also seen as utterly unique; whereas money makes all things comparable, “values” such as beauty, devotion, or integrity cannot, by definition, be compared. There is no mathematical formula that could possibly allow one to calculate just how much personal integrity it is right to sacrifice in the pursuit of art or how to balance responsibilities to your family with responsibilities to your God. (Obviously, people do make these kinds of compromises all the time. But they cannot be calculated.) One might put it this way: if value is simply what one considers important, then money allows importance to take a liquid form, by enabling us to compare precise quantities of importance and trade one off for the other. If someone does accumulate a very large amount of money, the first thing he or she is likely to do is to try to convert it into something unique, whether it be Monet’s water lilies, a prizewinning racehorse, or an endowed chair at a university.

What is really at stake here in any market economy is precisely the ability to make these trades, to convert “value” into “values.” All of us are striving to put ourselves in a position in which we can dedicate ourselves to something larger than ourselves. When liberals do well in America, it’s because they can embody that possibility: the Kennedys, for example, are the ultimate Democratic icons not just because they started as poor Irish immigrants who made enormous amounts of money but because they are seen as having managed, ultimately, to turn all that money into nobility.

Hints that Mr. Graeber may have a slightly different view of things than we do….

From his article “Turning Modes of Production Inside Out Or, Why Capitalism is a Transformation of Slavery”:

We can observe the following traits shared by slavery and capitalism:

(1) Both rely on a separation of the place of social (re)production of the labor force, and the place where that labor-power is realized in production – in the case of slavery, this is effected by transporting laborers bought or stolen from one society into another one; in capitalism, by separating the domestic sphere (the sphere of social production) from the workplace. In other words, what is effected by physical distance in one is effected by the anonymity of the market in the other.

(2) The transfer is effected through exchanging human powers for money: either by selling workers, or hiring them (essentially, allowing them to rent themselves).

(3) One effect of that transfer is ‘social death’, in the sense that the community ties, kinship relations and so forth that shaped the worker are, in principle, supposed to have no relevance in the workplace. This is true in capitalism too, at least in principle: a worker’s ethnic identity, social networks, kin ties and the rest should not have any effect on hiring or how one is treated in the office or shop floor, though of course in reality this isn’t true.

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So, in effect, a transfer effected just once, by sale, under a regime of slavery is transformed into one that is repeated over and over again under capitalism.